FOREIGN AFFAIRS; Flames From Ashes

The ugly issue of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz has flamed into an international disgrace, and just in the midst of the 50th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland, starting World War II.

The shameful speech by Poland's Primate, Jozef Cardinal Glemp, came as a new Polish Prime Minister, a Catholic intellectual and a dedicated democrat, is trying to lead Poland out of the long nightmare of totalitarianism brought on by the war. Has nothing been learned? In a mass at Poland's national shrine, Cardinal Glemp complained that ''the feelings of all Poles, and our sovereignty'' were being assaulted by Jewish groups that insisted the nuns be moved away from the death camp, silent symbol of the Holocaust.

''Dear Jews,'' he said, ''do not talk with us from the position of a people raised above all others, and do not dictate conditions that are impossible to fulfill.''

Providing an extreme example of cart before horse, he said, ''When there is no more anti-Polish feeling, there will be no more anti-Semitism among us.'' And he added: ''Your power lies in the mass media that are easily at your disposal in many countries. Let them not serve to spread anti-Polish feeling.''

The Cardinal thereby spread a painful issue of respect for the victims of a monstrous doctrine into a renewed issue of Christian-Jewish relations. There are only a few thousand Jews left in Poland, from a prewar community of 3.5 million. He showed the endemic persistence of anti-Semitism, even without Jews.

Cardinal Glemp purported to speak in sorrow and sympathy, but he came near echoing one of his predecessors, Cardinal Hlond, who as Primate said in 1936, ''There is a Jewish problem which will last as long as the Jews don't stop being Jews.''

True, many Catholic Poles including priests and nuns died at Auschwitz, along with 2.5 million Jews. True, the Carmelite nuns established their convent in 1984 to pray and mourn. True, seven American Jews who scaled the convent walls in July, and were beaten and thrown out by Polish workers, were aggressive in the way they chose to protest.

But Cardinal Glemp's remarks have escalated a dispute theoretically solved by agreement in 1987 into a problem the Vatican can no longer evade, and cast a shadow on Poland's new politics.

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Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the new Prime Minister, was chosen in part because he was one of Solidarity's leaders with the closest ties to the church. The newly legalized union, not really a political party but an association representing a variety of views, feels obliged to rely heavily on church support as it tries to organize transformation of the regime.

Mr. Mazowiecki, who founded an influential Catholic monthly in 1957, also founded a network of Catholic intellectual clubs. Among other things they organized dialogues on the Polish-Jewish past, as well as groups to look after Jewish cemeteries, since so few Jews still live in Poland.

Clearly, Solidarity is embarrassed by the Cardinal, whose relations with the Pope are known to be cool. Vatican sources say the Pope himself is embarrassed. He has said that ''hostility, or worse, hatred toward Judaism are in complete contradiction with the Christian vision of the dignity of man.'' But he has not spoken out on Cardinal Glemp's diatribe, nor on the convent, and he recently declared that the Jewish people had broken their covenant with God.

There is too much history of anti-Semitism in Poland for all this to be set aside as an unfortunate incident. John Paul II, the first Polish Pope, is well aware of it. He has made some important gestures toward Catholic-Jewish conciliation.

There is too much history of anti-Semitism, period, and events in Poland are providing a pretext to revive it in Western Europe. The French right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen denounced ''the Jewish international'' recently for undermining ''national spirit,'' and his fellow National Front leader Bernard Antony, a deputy in the European Parliament, said the Glemp speech had ''filled him with joy'' and raised ''to the world level what Le Pen is producing on the national level.''

It is horrible that cloistered nuns at such a tragic site should become an excuse for rekindling the very evil they claim to expiate. But it is happening. The Pope has the authority and needs to show the will to put a stop to it.

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A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 3, 1989, on Page 4004013 of the National edition with the headline: FOREIGN AFFAIRS; Flames From Ashes. Today's Paper|Subscribe